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How To Get The Google +1 Button & Get More Website Visitors From Google Search

By markh, on June 2nd, 2011

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This post explains how to get more website traffic from Google by adding the “Google +1” button. Google +1 helps promote websites through social sharing and can improve the impact of search engine optimisation (SEO) by improving click-through from Google search results, and even search result position (SERP) by affecting PageRank and relevance according to Google.

I have already added the button, so you can see it above, below and to the right of this blog post alongside the Tweet and Like buttons from Twitter and Facebook. You can display it in different sizes and with or without a “count bubble”.

Here are the different sized Google +1 Buttons:

Small (15px)

Medium (20px)

Standard (24px)

Tall (60px)

What Is The Google +1 Button?

Google’s “+1 Button” let’s visitors recommend web pages to Google as they browse the web. Following its launch on 1st June 2011 you can expect to see it on more and more websites, alongside the familiar ‘Tweet’ and ‘Like’ buttons from Twitter and Facebook.

You’ll start to see the results of people clicking +1 highlighted as a personal recommendation in Google search results. People will be drawn to results that have been given a +1 by their friends, so if people click +1 you might get more visitors referred by Google search.

How To Get The Google +1 Button On Your Website

If you are able to paste HTML into your web pages this requires two changes to each page (although on a CMS such as WordPress, or if you have a PHP template based website this involves just two changes because you won’t have to manually edit every page twice.)

The first change is to include some HTML in the <head> section of your page. You should get the code from Google to ensure you have the correct language variation, but this is what the UK coding looks like at the moment:

Get Google +1 Using Shortcodes In WordPress

One last thing. If you have a WordPress website, the best way to implement Google +1 is using a plugin that let’s you enter a shortcode to display the button. I wrote such a plugin for this website, so that’s how the buttons on this page are implemented.

So, if you would like a WordPress plugin that implements Google +1 sharing as shortcodes (and Facebook and Twitter buttons too), let me know. If there is a demand I’ll make it available.